The Tragic Tale of a Romance Undone by Radium

The Tragic Tale of a Romance Undone by Radium

Radiant

A tragic tale of romance gone radioactive.

Welcome to the second installment of 12 Panel Pitch, where we take an idea for a Hollywood feature film and boil it down to 12 visual beats. This week’s comic, a historical drama based on the Radium Girls, is by novelist Tom DeHaven and cartoonist Melanie Gillman. I’m surprised this story hasn’t already been made into a movie. If Hollywood does ever make it, I doubt they’ll cast Tom’s heroine in the same way Melanie did. That role, according to the rules of the commercial feature film (and, by now, our own internalized expectations), goes to a more svelte actor.

A reminder: The 10th and final installment of 12 Panel Pitch will be a script written by a Slate reader. And this just in: The winner will have his or her movie idea drawn by the genre-hopping master cartoonist Jim Rugg. The submission deadline is Friday, Dec. 13. Details here. The first 12 Panel Pitch can be found here.